A twice-weekly syndicated newspaper column on California public affairs.

Monday, June 11, 2018

DESPITE WHINERS, TOP TWO AGAIN WORKS AS PLANNED

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, JUNE 26, 2018, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS“DESPITE WHINERS, TOP TWO AGAIN WORKS
AS PLANNED”

It happens
every two years during the spring primary election season: One major party or
the other feels wronged by the Top Two primary system Californians adopted in
2010 and whines for months about its plight.

In
2016, the griping came from Republicans whose vote splintered in the primary
run for the U.S. Senate and left the eventual November runoff field to two
Democrats, Kamala Harris winning the seat previously held by three-termer
Barbara Boxer.

This
year Democrats did the complaining. Their rush of candidates seeking to knock
off seemingly vulnerable Republican members of Congress created the possibility
of extremely fragmented Democratic votes, especially in three Orange
County-based districts carried two years ago by the party’s presidential candidate
Hillary Clinton.

As
Republicans did two years earlier, Democrats made much of the Top Two system’s
“jungle primary” nickname.

But as
it turned out, counts in the first post-election week indicated Democrats will
likely make the runoffs in all those districts, the chief remaining doubt
coming in the 48th District, represented for decades by Republican
Dana Rohrabacher.

In that
coastline district, Rohrabacher had tallied just over 30 percent of the vote,
with the possibility of going higher when all provisional and late absentee
ballots are counted. Former Orange County Republican chairman Scott Baugh
trailed a bit behind two Democrats for the district’s second November ballot
slot under Top Two, which allows only two candidates to appear on runoff
ballots for each position: the two highest primary election vote-getters
regardless of party.

If
Baugh eventually makes the runoff (and chances are he will not, as he was more
than 1,400 votes behind Democrats Hans Kierstead, an M.D. and a stem cell
researcher, and businessman Harley Rouda – separated by just 87 votes),
Democrats should blame it on their own disorganization, not on the system.
Kierstead was supported by the state Democratic Party, while Rouda was funded
in large part by the national Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Their
circumstance evokes a 1930s-era remark by philosopher/comic Will Rogers, who
famously observed that “I don’t belong to any organized political party. I’m a
Democrat.”

Meanwhile,
in the 49th District just to the south, former Orange County
Democratic Party executive director Mike Levin, a lawyer, pulled 17.1 percent
of the vote, beating out two other significant Democrats for the right to take
on Republican political veteran Diane Harkey for a seat long occupied by the
GOP’s Darrell Issa.

And in
the 39th district, represented more than a decade by retiring
Republican Ed Royce, Democrat Gil Cisneros – winner of a $266 million Powerball
lottery prize in 2011 – easily beat back several other Democrats and will take
on Republican Assemblywoman and former Royce aide Young Kim in November.

Further
north, late counts indicated Democrat Josh Harder had emerged from yet another
crowded Democratic field to take on veteran Republican Jeff Denham this fall.

It
began to dawn on Democrats only in late April that their surfeit of eager
hopefuls could produce two GOP runoff candidates in districts that seemed ripe
for turning from red to blue. This happened once before, in 2012, when
Republicans placed two candidates into the runoff in a San Bernardino County
district with a large Democratic voter registration edge.

But
most likely not this time, because the party put significant money into all
these districts to assure that voters knew there could be such distortion.

In the
end, the more moderate Democratic candidate won out in all districts where the
outcome has been determined, precisely the intent of Top Two when it passed as
a ballot initiative.

If a
party was actually wronged this year, it was probably the GOP, which for the
second straight November will apparently have no candidate for the U.S. Senate,
longtime Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein to be opposed by fellow Democrat
Kevin de Leon, who barely beat out a field of almost completely unknown and
unfunded Republicans.

The
fault here lies not with the system, but with the GOP for failing to recruit
and support a significant candidate. Now Republican voters may decide the race
between the moderate Feinstein and the far more leftist de Leon.

All of
which means Top Two worked just as designed, no matter what the whiners said
before Election Day.

-30-
Elias is author of the current book “The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most
Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government's Campaign to Squelch It,” now
available in an updated third edition. His email address is tdelias@aol.com

About Me

Thomas Elias writes the syndicated California Focus column, appearing twice weekly in 88 newspapers around California, with circulation over 2.2 million.
He has won numerous awards from organizations like the National Headliners Club, the California Newspaper Publishers Association, the Los Angeles Press Club, and the California Taxpayers Association. He has been nominated three times for the Pulitzer Prize in distinguished commentary.
Elias is the author of two books, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government's Campaign to Squelch It" (now in its third edition; also published in Japanese and recently optioned for a television movie) and "The Simpson Trial in Black and White," co-authored with the late Dennis Schatzman.